Archive for the ‘Public Records’ Category

Government agencies, financial lenders, family history researchers and private investigators all have an interest in verifying whether a person has died, where and the circumstances. Here are some free resources to get you started with your search:

- Free Genealogy and Family History Sources & Databases is a page of resources I’m still building but it has links to a variety of sites for finding and verifying a death. It includes area specific and aggregated sources for death indexes, newspaper obituaries and death notices, cemeteries and the Death Master File aka Social Security Death Index.

- County Vital Records of deaths may be indexed online. Notices of deaths are sometimes buried(!) in county or town year-end reports.

- Deaths can be searched onsite at the county vital records recorder. If you don’t have the exact spelling you may be able to Wildcard your
county public record searches.

- Directories of Public Records online supplement your search with direct links to burials and deaths indexed by states, counties and private entities. All directories are incomplete. Even though this is a good one, you’ll find additional death indexes on my page, Free Genealogy and Family History Sources & Databases, that aren’t here.

- Search newspapers directly through their sites but also through the aggregated news site Google News and News Archive for mentions of your subject, which may identify where they lived, if not provide an obituary. Recorded deaths that are not at the government website of vital records may be in Newspaper databases of public records.

- Find the burial sites of military veterans and their spouses in the National Gravesite Locator .

- State government divisions of the Secretary of State, the state library and the state archive have digitized records. The documents and indexes that aren’t online are available for free at the agency repository. Often, the catalog of holdings is at the website.

- The New Orleans Public Library, Guide To Genealogical Materials details the various entities that have collected death and burial records and where they can be researched, which will guide you to types of sources you can find in Louisiana and other states.

- Search in various search engines using variations of the subject’s name: [First name Middle name Last name], [First name Middle initial Last name], [Last name First name Middle name]. Search names of relatives. Search birth names and married names. Add a city where they last lived or where they grew up or other identifiers, such as a business name.

• Disaster Affected Employer Search

• Online Dictionary and Thesaurus – The easiest to use

• Public record researchers and document retrieval specialists

• Social Security Death Index – The best!

• Indiana State Social Security Death Index

• Nevada State Social Security Death Index

• Idaho State Social Security Death Index

• State Statutes Addressing Access To Military Discharge Records (DD 214)

• West Virginia Birth and Marriage Index

• West Virginia Death Records Search

• Arizona Birth Certificates Search – 1955-1936

• Ohio Online Death Certificate Index – 1913 – 1944

• Minnesota Death Certificate Index – 1908-2001

• Forensic Database – National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law at Stetson University College of Law

• Online Daily Newspapers With Obituaries

• Obituary Search Engines and Indexes of Old Newspaper Obituaries

• Time For Memory: Obituaries

• Free Directory of Newspaper Obituaries and Obituary Resources by State

• Obituary Depot – WorldWide Obituary Locator and Newspaper Directory

• Obituary Daily Times (GEN-OBIT) Search

• Search Obituaries – GenealogyBank

• Obituaries | Death Notices | Newspaper Obituaries |

• Bing Advanced Operator Reference

• Open Site Explorer – Find links

• List of search engines – Wikipedia

• International Genealogy databases and research tools

• Heir Finders Investigator Handbook and Forms

• New York Attorney General Real Estate Finance Database

• State, Court, & County Law Libraries

• North Dakota Public Death Index

• Utah State Burials Database

• Utah Death Certificate Index – 1904-1958

• The rest of my favorite links are here.

From BRB Publications newsletter:

Per PRRN Member Judith Smith, the Executive Director of the San Luis Obispo Superior Court – Ms. Susan Matherly – has simply had enough. Ms. Matherly has had it with all the public record search firms hired by employers to check criminal records of local residents that apply for jobs. On March 14th she announced at a local Bar Association luncheon that she was shutting down the public access terminal to background screening firms. And on Monday March 19th she did it. TheIT staff removed the public access computer and put it in a locked room to be accessible only by attorneys and their investigators.

To better understand Ms. Matherly’s logic, consider the following summarized statements she also made at the March 14th luncheon, as reported by Ms. Smith:

But wait, there’s more!

• ChangeDetection – Know when any web page changes

• InfoMinder – Web page tracker

• Commonwealth War Dead and Cemetery Database

• Charity and Non Profit Organizations Status Database

• Latest tweets and twitter trends | Chirpcity

• Find local blogs – Placeblogger

• State and Local Government Search Engine

• Google search bookmarklet for social search across the web

• Find neighbors on a street

• California Newspaper Catalog

• International Soundex Reunion Registry

• Lawyer profiles and assessments – Avvo.com

• Greg Notess: Speaker and Presenter on Web Searching for Researchers

• California Genealogical Society and Library Catalog

• California Libraries Catalog – find materials and libraries

• The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs & Body Language Cues

• NamUs – National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

• Missing Persons Database – California Dept. of Justice

• Google Plus Search, Google Plus Directory | Find People on Plus

• Access to Adoption Records – Summary of State Laws

• Information and Instructions to Verify Social Security Numbers Online

• UK Company Information

• Interstate Compact Offender Tracking System

• United States Online Historical City Directories

• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database of slaving voyages

The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sacramento County, California Sheriff has developed its own inmate release notification – Sheriff’s Inmate Release Elective Notification System (SIRENS) – that replaces the multi-agency VINELink (Victim Information and Notification) Everyday) program. The SIRENS service, like VINELink, will alert registered users by phone, text or email after a specified inmate is released. (See the SIRENS brochure for instructions.) Start by looking up the full name in the inmate search database.

Hopefully, VINELink won’t drop their Sacramento County incarcerated offender name search because it’s more flexible than the one at the Sheriff’s website. Both were functional today. The Sheriff’s site requires a full first name and full last name to find an inmate. That’s not helpful if you want to see everyone with the same last name — which you’ll want to do if you only have a nickname. Or maybe you want to see all of the possible relatives simultaneously incarcerated, right? The VINELink database can be searched with a partial first name AND a partial last name.

But these databases are better in tandem because the inmate information shown by the Sacramento Sheriff is more detailed. Alias’ and DOB’s are shown for those in custody and for released inmates, along with their release date. Because the date of birth is excised for out-of-custody inmates on VINELink you don’t know whether the “James Johnson’s” listed are the same person, or whether they are a match with those at the Sheriff’s site.

But neither site had private investigators in mind when they developed these tools.

There are many substantial collections of genealogical materials — telephone and city directories, school alumni directories, newspapers, electronic subscription databases — in San Francisco Bay Area specialty libraries.

The California Genealogical Library and Society is located in downtown Oakland. I mentioned this resource at my Google+ site. See the list of their United States City Directories — available only to members, accessible to anyone for a small fee. One room of the library is dedicated to the extensive collection of California telephone books and city directories. A few college alumni directories are also here. The subscription databases available onsite include Newspaperarchive.com (see their California collection) and the state birth, marriage, divorce and death indexes from Vitalsearch covering 21 states, including California.

The most extensive collection of family history and genealogical resources west of Salt Lake City is in the Bay Area, housed at the Sutro Library, a branch of the California State Library and located in San Francisco. Their collection of 20,000 city directories and 10,000 telephone books is a gift of gold to those of us who are Bay Area private investigators — a professional field that prized these tools to locate people and businesses and reverse telephone numbers long before there were electronic databases.

The Family History Center in Oakland can order microfilmed copies of some California birth, death and marriage certificates from the repository in Salt Lake City. You pay a modest fee of $5.

My prior post on Genealogical Resources in U.S. Federal Depository Libraries is still current and I’ve updated the links in Find historical records – 50 state list. Future posts will address free 20th century genealogical databases on the Internet of interest to private investigators. Meanwhile, peruse these genealogy resources and links.

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